A Moment in Time/What Kind of Legacy?
This week, I began transcribing my first set of minutes. Previously, I had been working on the typed programs, so working with the handwritten, far more detailed minutes has been an exciting and interesting shift, especially since I’m getting more information about talks and readings whose titles I’ve already seen on the programs.
I’m transcribing the minutes for the 1899-1900 season, a season chosen because of its potential for discussion about the turn of a new century and what that could mean for the club, for women, or for the world. The women do take note of this important moment in time, but not quite in the way we had hoped. An excerpt from the minutes of the Club’s January 2nd, 1900 meeting reads,
The President then made a few remarks as to where we do, or do not stand, with regard to the Burning question, “Is this the 19th or 20th Century?” and read from the Sun of Jan. 2nd a short notice of Flammarion the astronomer’s decision, that we are in the closing year of the nineteenth century.
There is no further discussion on the topic beyond this brief mention, either in this meeting or subsequent ones. It seems that the Club members do not see their present moment as a significant change-over. Maybe the minutes of the 1900-1901 season contain the kind of declarations of intention and importance regarding a new century that these minutes, unfortunately, do not.
Despite my disappointment on that front, there is still a great deal of fascinating content in these minutes. I’ve transcribed through the meeting of February 6th, so I still have a couple of months left, but even in the incomplete season I’ve read so far, I’ve noticed what seems to be a great frequency of race-centric presentations that I didn’t quite catch on to when I was only working with the programs. A lot of this type of programming sounds, as you’d guess, unsettling at best.
The first talk that caught my eye was part of the October 7th, 1899 meeting. The Club welcomed a series of “Book Notes,” or individual members’ reviews of books they’ve read on their own. Miss Ellen Duvall presents on two books, one of which is titled Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due, by Edmond Demolins, published that year. Miss Duvall says of the book,
The treatment of this question in this book from a French point of view, is, she said, something almost miraculous,–and there is a sweet a reasonableness in it also.
After some cursory research, this book (originally published, as Duvall mentions, in French) seems to focus on the “originality and superiority” of Anglo-Saxon-based society in England and America. A full-text version of this book can be found here.
Later, a talk by Miss Anne Weston Whitney on the “Art in Doll-Making” at the January 7th, 1900 meeting also makes a point of highlighting how dolls not specifically modeled after the “Anglo-Saxon type” are undesirable.
The final piece of programming in this vein (that I’ve seen so far) is a talk by Mrs. Walter Bullock on January 23rd, 1900, titled “Anglo-Saxon Character,” which gives “a clean and comprehensive account of the two most prominent theories with regard to the origin of the Aryan race,” and uses some very particular language that I find very, how do I put this? Indicative of someone with what I’d in our current day call white-supremacist leanings. Mrs. Bullock says in her talk,
There, it has been said, was the white race first found in its greatest purity.
I guess reading about Mrs. Bullock’s talk about when and where the white race came to be its “purest” isn’t totally surprising given all our recent discussion and concern with how to reconcile the legacy of this club with Confederate legacies and the brutal racism that accompanies them, as well as non-Confederate-specific racist conceptions and attitudes of the time. But even in that context, this kind of programming being shared among the elite and powerful is…Not Good. At the end of this particular talk, Miss Brent proposes that it be type-written and placed in the Club library so others can read and revisit it. Again, these attitudes aren’t shocking in context, but this kind of content is still something that we have to process and/or expose as part of the Club’s legacy, whatever that legacy may be.
Names and Dates: Connecting the dots
Diving into discovering who the women of the Club are has come with some rewards, and many challenges. For the past few weeks now I have been in charge of figuring out who was in the Club when and where they lived. Thanks to the incredible record-keeping in the early years that is not a difficult task. Much of the same information overlaps in different notebooks. Essentially, from 1980 to 1916 we have an almost complete record of who the members in the Club and also who the board of management was. However, these are just names and nothing more. My next task was to try to figure who these women were or at least try to find some of their real names—not their husbands names.
Instead of trying to find information about over a hundred women, we thought it would be best to start small, and higher up, with the board of management. This board includes an average of twelve women. One president, two vice presidents, a recording secretary, a corresponding secretary, a treasurer, and six members of the board. These are the women that help run and decide the direction of the club. Having the lists of the board from year to year all in one place can also help explain changes in the dynamic of the club. For example, Hunter has been transcribing the minutes for Fall of 1903 where Lydia Crane was recording the minutes. In the middle of a meeting the hand-writing changes indicating that Miss Crane is not writing anymore. Looking at the board of management for 1903-1904 we can see that Miss Crane is not actually the recording secretary, but she was for 1901-1902 and then comes back in 1906-1907. These are the tiny shifts that we are beginning to pick up the longer we read what these ladies were doing. We are able to piece together to try to get a more three dimensional image of the Club.
So the board of management seemed like a good place to start, since these are the women that the club revolves around, and we picked the year 1903-1904. Here is where the difficulty lies, as I have mentioned in my previous posts: many of the women are referred to by their husbands names, which makes it hard to find out their real names. However, I have been able to use different resources such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com to be able to locate the names of the men, and then many times they have the names of the women as well.
When doing these searches it is hard to determine if the information that I have found is really for the same person that I am searching for. Without knowing the birth and death information about a person before I search for them, a slew of people can come into the found list and I am unsure of if it is who I am looking for. Another thing that I am finding more relevant and difficult in my search is the cemeteries where these people are buried. Many of the ones that I have been able to find are in either Green Mount Cemetery or in Loudon Park Cemetery, with private church cemeteries thrown in throughout. Green Mount is the place where many people of prestige were buried. While I have not found out much information about Loudon Park Cemetery, there is a large portion of the cemetery which was dedicated to the burial of Union soldiers which might have had an impact on who wanted to be buried there depending on their sympathies during the war. Another piece of information is where the two cemeteries are located. Green Mount being located in Greenmount Ave, a couple of blocks south of North Ave. This is located close to where most of the members of the Club lived, therefore making it convenient for them to go to Green Mount. Loudon Park on the other hand, is a 30 minute drive from Green Mount when I put the directions into Google. On horse that would take much longer, let along a slow moving burial procession would be about two days.
Aside from the interesting information about the cemeteries I have been somewhat successful with finding information about the women. Out of the twelve members of the board of management for 1903-1904, I was able to find birth and death years for six of the members and was able to determine the names of two of the women that had gone by their husbands names. In 1903 Mrs. Jordan Stabler, or Jennie Stabler (although I am not positive that this is her) was 35; Mrs. Philip Uhler, or Julia Pearl Uhler, was 44; Miss Lydia Crane was 70; Miss Ellen Duvall was 62; Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese was 47; and Miss Eveline Early was 35. I was really disappointed that I could not find anything on Mrs. John Wrenshall, who is the president for many years of the Club. Thanks to findagrave.com I was able to find a picture of Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese.
It is a sad realization that many of the women in the Club are only recognized by a name that is not really theirs. Thankfully there are tools out there that help make it possible to learn about Julia Pearl Uhler instead of just Philip Uhler.
Women’s education in Baltimore: Goucher & Lutherville
A few weeks back, I wrote about my interest in the Lutherville Female Seminary, a now defunct college in Baltimore County that was devastated by a fire in 1911. This week, I’ll be focusing on the kinds of education offered at two early Baltimore area women’s colleges with connections to the Club—The Woman’s College of Baltimore City (now Goucher College) and the aforementioned Maryland College for Women in Lutherville—as well as their roles in Baltimore society.
In Anna Knipp and Thaddeus Thomas’ (quite extensive) The History of Goucher College, they quote an 1860 article of the Saturday Review which encapsulates, almost hilariously, how untenable the denial of mental equality between the genders can be: “The great argument against the existence of this equality of intellect in women is, that it does not exist. If that proof does not satisfy a female philosopher, we have no better to give.”
But we can see this kind of circular logic as exemplifying just how absurd this viewpoint had become. In 1860—and especially in Baltimore—it could no longer be defended.
First, though, it’s only right to note that the higher education of women in Baltimore had initially failed—twice. The first of these failed institutions was initially on St. Paul Street: The Baltimore Female College, funded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, opened its doors in 1848 and closed them in 1890. Then there was The Mount Washington Female College of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which opened in 1856 and closed in 1860. This latter school, though, is of particular importance to us at Loyola: it was sold to the Catholic Church and eventually became Mount Saint Agnes College, which merged in 1971 with Loyola College as it became co-educational. It’s part of our heritage.
But in her book In the Company of Educated Women, author Barbara Miller Solomon points to a tremendous boom in women’s education between the 1870s and 1910s. Although she makes no mention of the Lutherville Seminary (which seems, as I lamented in my last post, to have been practically erased from the annals of history), she does make mention of two Baltimore schools: The Woman’s College of Baltimore and the College of Notre Dame in Maryland.
Like the Lutherville Seminary, what strikes me—and Solomon—about these two schools is their religious roots. As for the College of Notre Dame, the religious connection is obvious; in fact, it was the first Catholic women’s college in the United States. But as for Goucher college, its religious roots are more obscure—it received much of its funding from the Methodist Conference in 1884. But it runs deeper than that; as Solomon points out, these schools “adhered to the religious ideal of virtuous, True Womanhood,” and more overtly religious schools such as Notre Dame stressed “religious rather than academic ideals.”
But, apparently, Notre Dame and present-day Goucher offered some of the best education available to women at this time, and “extended woman’s sphere beyond the familial roles.” Solomon attributes this, in no small part, to the proximity and influence of Johns Hopkins University—then also present in downtown Baltimore, as opposed to its present-day Homewood Campus. In fact, she points to The Woman’s College of Baltimore City as being rivaled in terms of its “high intellectual standards” by Randolph-Macon College for Women in Virginia (sponsored by Presbyterians).
From the very beginning, The Woman’s College of Baltimore City did much to emphasize its academic rigor. It was no “seminary”; it was a college, and one of the finest available for women. Consider the statement of Bishop Andrews, quoted here in its entirety:
I would not give a fig for a weakling little thing of a seminary. We want such a school, so ample in its provisions, of such dignity in its buildings, so fully provided with the best apparatus, that it shall draw to itself the eyes of the community and that young people shall feel it an honor to be enrolled among its students.
But what of seminaries? Clearly, their reputations were less stellar; according to Bishop Andrews of Goucher, they were something to be scoffed at. But the Lutherville Female Seminary was not exactly a joke; information is scarce, but even in its infancy in 1853, its classes included “moral and mental philosophy, handwriting, ancient languages, natural philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, German, English literature, music, drawing, and painting.” Its reputation eventually became such that students attended the school from out of state, whereas its initial students seem to have come primarily from the city and the county. In 1895, it was appropriately rechristened the Maryland College for Women.
But, in spite of the grandeur of its facade, conditions within the Seminary were gloomy. The Heritage Committee of the Greater Timonium American Bicentennial Committee (!) dug up an invaluable insight into the daily lives of the students there. The reminiscence of an alumna is printed in their volume The Limestone Valley. Here’s an excerpt:
The school building was large and insufficiently heated. The girls went around the house enveloped in shawls and then were not warm. There was a large dormitory with about thirty beds and each bed was a little apartment with curtains for a dressing room. The provision for the table was also very primitive; bread, butter and molasses for breakfast and supper, with tea or coffee and ham, potatoes and hominy for dinner.
But what’s most remarkable about the Lutherville Seminary is that it existed at all. According to The Limestone Valley, it was from the very beginning meant to be the center of the community; in their words, “the village of Lutherville was planned around the Lutherville Seminary.” Lutherville is rather unique to Baltimore county (largely an amalgamation of unplanned, spontaneous demiurban sprawl) in that it was a planned community. Its street grid was very deliberately laid out, and has hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years.
In this respect, one can rightly call Lutherville a community that was, from its very inception, centered around women’s education. In the 1850s, this was progressive. And to Lutheran founders John G. Morris, Charles Morris, and Dr. Benjamin Kurtz, it was never to be a “weakling little thing of a seminary” at all—it was to be a “first rate Female College.” And that’s what it became.
Germans at Lehmann’s Hall
Looky what I found!
I found this advertisement in the inaugural issue of the Society Visiting List—or, as it is more commonly known, the Baltimore Blue Book—which first came out in 1889, and is still being published today.
The Blue Book was one example of what are known as social registers, lists of those who are known, and worth knowing—i.e., the social elite. According to the all-knowing (though not always fully informed) Wikipedia, the social register is a distinctly American phenomenon, and the first one was published in Cleveland in 1880.
The social registers were subscription publications, like a cross between a book and a periodical, and distributed to a very small, closed readership. You had to be part of the crowd to be in the know, if you know what I mean. My neighbor John Hurd, who gave the Aperio group a tour of his fantastic Victorian-era house a couple of weeks ago, furnished in period style, told me that only 14 copies of the latest edition were actually distributed.
The edition of the Blue Book that I was looking at was digitized by the Society Visiting List, who graciously provide a link to it from their website. I was actually looking up some members of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore, trying to see who actually was from the elite classes, and who might not have made the cut. Mrs. Uhler, yes. Miss Crane and Miss Reese, no. (For more on the Blue Book, issues of which are held at the MDHS, see this recent Baltimore Sun article, which even includes a video featuring our friend Francis the reference librarian.)
The ad was included with lots of others for clothiers, tailors, jewelers, florists, music lessons and instruments, elocutionists, schools, caterers, druggists, doctors—and theaters and other places of amusement. Pretty much all the sorts of things the crème de la crème might need. Of course, regular Baltimoreans would have patronized many of the same businesses too.
As Ellen said in her post, one puzzling aspect of Lehmann’s was the various street numbers used. This ad gives the address as 852, 854, and 856 Howard St. The address that’s given throughout the minutes (the name “Lehmann’s Hall” only appears two or three times throughout the year or so when the club used it as their primary meeting place) is 861 Garden St. So what gives?
Some historical maps of Baltimore provide the answer. First, a glance at the 1901-1902 Sanborn fire insurance map of Baltimore shows that Lehmann’s Hall actually faced both N. Howard and Linden Ave.
If you squint, you can see that the street number given for the northwest corner of the hall is 861 Linden, and on Howard the street numbers jump from 850 for the building next door to the south of Lehmann’s, to 860 for the building just north of the hall. So Lehmann’s would have occupied 852, 854, and 856—and 858, for that matter! Howard St. Since Howard would have been the more “commercial” side, that’s probably why they listed these addresses in the Blue Book.
But the WLCB minutes say, repeatedly, that they met at 861 Garden St. The map gives the address as 861 Linden. Well, another map I found solves this answer. (I found the same street name on the 1890 Sanborn map also, but was unable to get an image that would reproduce online.)
So that’s one problem solved. But a question I had about this hall was why they didn’t continue meeting there after their first season. The minutes from 1890-1891 indicate that the Club does not want to keep meeting there, but don’t say why. (And eventually they arrange to meet at halls provided by the Academy of Sciences, which would host them for years afterward.)
This ad provides some answers, but also raises more questions.
The ad states that they have “restored these Halls to their former neat and attractive appearance.” So clearly the halls had not been neat and attractive, even by admission of the halls’ proprietor, Edward G. Lehmann, in recent memory. Perhaps the ladies of the Club felt that though the halls were sufficiently decent in 1890 when the Club started meeting there, they lacked the caché of a more dignified space. Or perhaps they worried that their activities would be seen as outré or somehow disreputable, given other activities that had previously gone on at this address.
The ad also lists the sorts of events they hope to attract: “Germans, balls, soirées, weddings, and other Social Entertainments.” Now what, exactly, are Germans?
A close look at the map shows that across the street from Lehmann’s was “Deichman College.” A little digging shows that Deichmann College Prep School was one of several German-language high schools located in Baltimore at the time (that’s a subject for another post!). So perhaps the “Germans” had something to do with, well, Germans? And maybe this association with a particular ethnic group made the halls less appealing to the blue-blooded members of the Club?
Further searching indicates that “Germans” did and did not have to do with actual Germans. They were not an event for Germans, but rather a kind of social event originating in Germany. Short for German cotillion, they were events involving dancing and other games. So it would be a sort of ball or soirée geared at the social set that made up the Blue Book’s audience.
Certainly the minutes reveal that the meetings of the WLBC could be considered “Social Entertainments.” But perhaps the Club didn’t want to make that aspect of their activities so obvious.
Titles, Texts, and Some Sapphic Poems
When I started compiling a list of the poems Lizette Woodworth Reese shared with the Woman’s Literary Club, I realized that my primary challenge would be tracking down the actual titles of her works mentioned on the meeting programs I’ve transcribed (1890-1905). More often than not, her original works are just listed as something unhelpful like “Three Poems, Lizette Woodworth Reese.” Fortunately, I was able to find many of these missing titles in the minutes that have been transcribed so far (1890-1895, 1910-1912), and hope to find the rest by looking through the minutes of the 1895-1905 seasons.
Another related challenge/question I encountered whose answer also lies in the minutes is that since the formatting for almost every kind of presentation given to the Club follows more or less the same = format on the programs, it’s tricky to tell whether something Lizette shared that actually was titled something other than “Poem” is a poem or something else–an essay, a review, a story. Again, referring to the corresponding meeting minutes usually clears this up.
Of the 20 readings I’ve been able to both identify as poems and confirm titles of, I’ve been able to track down the text of 13 so far. I’ve found the texts Lizette chose to read to the Club scattered all over the place–some in her published volumes, some in her papers held at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, and some on generic poetry sites and in periodical records online.
One of her poems that struck me in particular is called “Lydia,” and it stood out to me for a couple of reasons. At first glance, I thought it could perhaps be written about the longtime Club recording secretary, Lydia Crane, especially since it was one of the first things Lizette shared with the Club. However, upon closer investigation, the poem references Sudbury, a town in Massachusetts, twice, so that doesn’t seem likely.
The other reason this poem caught my eye has to do with our prior group discussion about how many of the Club women, including Lizette Woodworth Reese, remained unmarried. We’ve also discussed ‘Boston marriages,’ and the possibility that the reason for some of these women remaining unwed could be because they weren’t heterosexual. In “Lydia” and the poem that immediately follows it in the collection of poems I found it in, “Anne,” (which also references Sudbury), I hear what, to me, could definitely be the voice of a woman who loves other women. Both of these poems are celebrations of another woman’s beauty, grace, and glory (“Anne” even raises its subject to the level of divinity, and romanticizes her from afar) and both contain strong violet imagery, which has long been associated with lesbianism thanks to the Greek poet Sappho.
I don’t want to make broad claims about a dead woman’s sexuality without evidence, or claim that these two poems that caught my eye are necessarily evidence themselves. However, following our prior conversations (and even before that), it’s been on my mind, so discovering this sort of poetry leaves a strong impression on me, and I’m looking forward to uncovering more of what Lizette Woodworth Reese chose to share with the Club.
Lehmann’s Hall–What are you?
In the early years ofthe Woman’s Literary Club, they met at 861 Garden Street. Some time later, they began meeting at Lehmann’s Hall, which is addressed as 858 N. Howard Street, but, as Dr. Cole told me, used to be at 861 Garden Street. My assignment for this week was to research the history behind Lehmann’s Hall, and how the women came to meet there.
After some research, I came to the conclusion that any discoveries I made would not come about easily. In fact, there was remarkablylittle information on Lehmann’s Hall, and virtually nothing about 861 Garden Street. I assumed the address change of Lehmann’s Hall from 861 Garden Street to 858 N. Howard Street occurred after the Great Baltimore Fire in 1904 that left a huge portion of the city decimated.
I cannot paint a complete picture of Lehmann’s Hall, nor can I answer the questions of why the women started meeting there and why they eventually stopped. However, through my research, I found some interesting tidbits about Lehmann’s Hall, which, today, is right behind the popular coffee joint, the Bun Shop.
The earliest record I could find of Lehmann’s Hall is from the Maryland Historical Society, which credits various musical performances, concerts, Glee Clubs, and plays as being performed at Lehmann’s Hall between 1875 and 1914.
Lehmann’s Hall was also mentioned in an 1890 edition of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine, which described the “Orioles” Subordinate Lodge as meeting at Lehman’s Hall [sic] on 861 Garden Street on the second and fourth Sundays of the month.
In the 1898 Volume XXVIII of The National Druggist, the forty-sixth annual meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association met at Lehmann’s Hall, though the address was written as 856 N. Howard Street, which would debunk my hypothesis about the fire sparking the change of street names.
In the August 22, 1907 edition of the “Daily Bulletin of theManufacturers’ Record”, the single mention of Lehmann’s Hall is to highlight the remodeling and addition to the building by the Ellicott and Emmart architects.
By 1935, right before World War II, Lehmann’s Hall was a popular destination for Nazi sympathizer rallies, as well as the local bowling alley and dance hall. In a photograph in the Maryland Historical Society archives, Lehmann’s Hall has a sign out front describing it as a “Café Des Artes,” and it is addressed as 852 N. Howard Street.
I cannot fully uncloud the mystery behind Lehmann’s Hall, nor can I provide conclusive, definitive answers as to how the Woman’s Literary Club came to find itself there. However, it does seem that, despite road changes and address inconsistencies, Lehmann’s Hall remained a gathering spaced for quite a number of years, and even lends itself to a popular gathering space today. It was the primary meeting space of the Woman’s Literary Club during their genesis and early years, and I wait with anticipation to see where/when/and how Lehmann’s Hall falls off the radar of the Woman’s Literary Club, should that information come about through further transcription of club minutes.